Hostage (14 page)

I followed him up on deck, but not right away. Many people wanted to watch our departure. Under an unblemished blue spring sky, the cumbersome ship moved away from the land with a calculated, graceless, indifferent slowness. Whistles went off and people shouted. There was the usual hubbub on the dock. A mix of vendors, guides and beggars were hoping for profits and alms. Friends and families stood by as destinies separated. A mother was crying and waving her handkerchief. A man wearing sunglasses—her husband?—caressed her hair.

Of course, no one had come to bid me farewell. My true love, Blanca, was far away, in the New World. Was she thinking of me? Did she resent me for having abandoned her? Actually, why
had
I left her? Did I want to find out if she could be convinced, with time, to belong to another? Did I see myself as a thief of her soul? Had I left so I could delve into these questions? My morose, bizarre roommate had vanished into the crowd. Later, I found him back in the cabin. He had a book on his knees and was staring into space. I did not disturb him.

In the evening, he didn’t come to dinner. Perhaps he was unwell with a migraine or an upset stomach. But why didn’t he speak? I concluded he simply did not want to exchange meaningless words with a stranger. That was his privilege.

That night I slept badly. I was dreadfully seasick. My roommate saw me running to the sink, yet he never asked me if he could do anything for me. In fact, he never said a word. He spent the night sitting bolt upright in his chair, his head buried in his book, his mind far away, living in his own world. Would he remain seated, unapproachable, impassive, until our arrival? Could he be a deaf-mute? From time to time, he expressed himself with nods and glances. I would have asked to change cabins, but they were all occupied.

Two days and two nights went by. I could not keep food down and suffered from a violent headache. Fortunately, my roommate wound up taking care of me. He brought me warm tea for my stomach and cold water for my burning forehead. Then, one morning, I woke up soothed; the sea had become calm. Soon, the ship put in at Aden. I went up on deck. Some passengers were returning home, and others, in transit, were setting off to discover the picturesque parts of the city. Young local boys, stripped to the waist, were showing all sorts of colorful objects to amused potential customers.

In my cabin, my roommate said in a barely audible, low-pitched voice, “Rest. You’re better, but you’ve been weakened by what you’ve been through.”

I thanked him for looking after me. He nodded. “By the way,” he said, “I speak with difficulty. Don’t take it personally.”

He is sick, I said to myself. You could see it in his face. “Tell me about yourself,” he said.

I wondered if I should tell him about Blanca, about our love, so happy and yet so foolishly complex. Instead, I said something else. “I’m a student. I’m going to the Far East because I’m preparing a doctoral dissertation on heresy in mysticism.”

I also told him about the legend of the lost Jewish kingdom. It aroused his interest.

“What I’m intrigued by,” he said, “is the oblivion. No one remembers this story.”

“Well, we share an interest in the quest for hidden things,” I said. “You might well ask: In order to probe his own abyss, does man have to detach himself from it? I would answer that sometimes we want to break the mirror by pushing back the horizons it contains.”

He interrupted me. “And what if the mirror reflected the truth of the other within yourself? Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”

I answered, “It would be a defeat. And I seek in mysticism a way to avoid it by plunging right in with eyes wide open.”

Our conversation continued on various subjects: literature and its challenges, the reasoning of philosophers, the traps of youth and the despairing wisdom of old age. He spoke about everything except his life. Why? I dared to ask him the question. He answered after a long silence.

“One day in my peregrinations, I met an old man who claimed to return from faraway times. Wasted, with a fiery gaze and a head held high, he told me atrocious stories, sometimes very old and obscure, as if he had been implicated in them. Like this meeting, for instance: ‘His name is Isaac, son of Abraham. As in the Bible. Both came close to the altar. But in his story, it was Isaac, the son, who came back alone. It was he who had the leading part. He said he was ready to reveal the truth known only to the Creator. But he warned me: Whoever would listen to his words would be condemned to go around with an inexpressible inner sadness that would never leave him, not even after his death.’ ”

I felt a chill.

A few days later, before arriving in Bombay, he said to me, “This is where I leave you. Perhaps someday we’ll meet again. On the road, in an ashram or sanctuary. Don’t be angry if I say nothing more. I don’t have the right to. In one year and a day I’m going to take a vow of silence. Somewhere I hope to meet the man who knows the Messiah’s name and identity as well as the date of his advent. When that happens, the whole world will know it, including you. On that day, man will understand that, faced with his destiny, which is his truth, questions and answers will have become one.”

He handed me a thick envelope with a message written on it: “To be opened only in a year, three months and three nights.” He asked me to give him my word. I did.

He had more than one name, but the ones he gave me were G’dalya and Paritus ben Pinhas ha-Cohen.

I never saw him again.

I often think back on our meeting and our conversations. But I never heard G’dalya mentioned again until I had returned to Europe with Blanca and several friends for a “pilgrimage to the roots,” a popular trend at the time, especially among young Jews and Christians who had discovered the horrors of contemporary history. We were in Kraków—in other words, not far from the cursed place called “the black hole of History,” where my father and Arele had been subjected to absolute evil. Young musicians entertained tourists in public places and on café terraces by singing and playing popular Jewish tunes from before the Upheaval. Blanca and our friends, worn out from the trip, had gone back to the hotel. I felt the need to take a walk in the evening air.

My gaze was attracted by a group of musicians who were forming a circle around a young and skinny bearded violinist who, with a look of concentration, was feigning to be playing: He was bowing vigorously and rhythmically, but his instrument had no strings.

During a pause I went up to him and offered him a drink. I spoke French, then English. He looked at me without understanding. “I don’t speak Polish.” When I tried Yiddish, we could converse. He wanted a glass of water. He said he was from “not very far away.” He wanted me to call him simply “the musician.” He was the only Jew in his group. I asked what he did when he wasn’t playing. All sorts of things, he said. He listened to the rustling of trees in the wind and, around here, to the song of the dead buried beneath mountains of ash. He had been in Kraków only since the previous day, yet forever: Time was important to him only as the rhythm of a musical melody. I told him that I had played the violin as an adolescent, that I loved popular Hasidic tunes, which induced tears, smiles and fervor, and a joy arousing ecstasy. I asked about his way of “playing.” “It’s the violin,” he replied. “I belong to it, whereas the other violins belong to the musicians.” He had found his violin in a gutted Jewish house in the Carpathian Mountains. “When I bent over to dust it,” the musician said, “it started to talk to me with a human voice, without trickery or stratagems. It begged to be taken away, to be cared for and loved by me; it couldn’t bear living alone anymore, rejected by all. It was at the end of its tether, suffering too greatly. And when I hesitated, it promised to sing for me as no other instrument had ever sung. It would confide secrets to me that no other ears had ever heard. Its songs would give my happiness an age-old dimension; when
I was sad, it would change my sadness into a melody of such beauty and moving sonority that even the angels in heaven had never known anything like it. In short, it would become my faithful companion in both joy and anguish.”

The musician of silence expressed himself with great seriousness—I would even say solemnity. I repressed my desire to smile. He had more to say, but he had to return to his group. The orchestra played until midnight. Though I was exhausted, I waited for the his return. Seeing how tired I was, he suggested meeting the following night.

The man fascinated me. I wanted to know who he really was. Whom had he learned such things from? Where did he live? I spent a sleepless night next to Blanca, wondering.

Rising at dawn, I walked alone around the small streets of the royal old city of Kraków, surrounded by ghosts coming down from the mountains, so close and so threatening. In the evening, with Blanca and our friends, I found the musician and his violin at the same place, shortly before he began “playing.”

I asked him why his violin was silent.

“You really don’t understand a thing,” he replied in his calm, low voice. “My violin isn’t silent. People just refuse to listen to it, so it resists them. But it expresses itself better than I do, better than all of us, and differently, it speaks. It speaks for all those who made use of it to express the meaning of their shattered lives. Composers, violinists, singers and dancers, all those who were moved, overwhelmed by love or hope, or sadness, changed by the curse of God and human misery, all those whose death throes live on in this instrument—this violin conveys
their cries, their lamentations. But people are morally, mentally, humanly incapable of hearing it. I alone …”

He cut himself off.

“You alone what?”

“I was going to say, excuse me for being conceited, that I alone on this cursed earth am worthy of hearing it. But that’s not true. I met someone else who was—an odd fellow, a wanderer, roaming in and out of other people’s lives, he attended a solo concert I gave in France before a Hasidic audience. Why had so many people come out to hear a violinist whose violin produced no audible sound? Some out of curiosity. Some sought a very new or very old message, coming from the origins of history that plunge into the memory of God. Others saw it as an original work of poetry. One old man mentioned a Hasidic school that glorified silence. Another described a rabbinical marriage where he heard a whole orchestra made up of stringless violins. Oh, yes, the Hasidim are true romantics. In a large gathering, introducing twenty-odd great violinists (the orchestra accepts only good musicians), all with stringless violins, is a bold thing to do! And the audience, meditative and moved, listened to them. And every person heard them. I’m just a soloist, and I’m not sure that my listeners in France heard me. But what of it! I can hear my violin. And so did the other man.

“Tell me more about the other man.”

“Yes, the odd fellow who looked like a happy beggar or an unhappy prince. He had just returned from India, Jerusalem and other places, from another era. He claimed he could understand things that elude understanding, see the invisible
and triumph over the power of Death by removing its bare face. Our first encounter was stormy. I criticized him for hating the dead, whereas my violin tries to appease them. He replied that apparently I was too ignorant to understand the meaning of his approach: It was not the dead but Death that he wished to subdue. That’s why he liked my violin and its music. He even offered to compose an oriental tune for my violin inspired by an ancient text taken from the Dead Sea Scrolls. I said in my view, my violin’s sorrowful complaint was more closely connected to Christian Europe than to the Hebraic tradition. ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘I’ll find appropriate words in the New Testament or in Martin Luther. And if you dislike those, I also know some Bohemian tales.’ This fellow, whom I met by chance in France, is a walking, living library—a kind of human miracle.”

My heart began racing, as before a surprise. “How much time did you spend together?”

“Exactly a week.”

Like me.

“Did he give you the song he promised?”

“He did. One without lyrics.”

“And what was its message?”

“There was none. It’s a song that tells all mankind: You don’t deserve my words or my voice. In fact, you don’t deserve our dreams or our lessons. Besides, you’ve never understood anything about our destiny.”

I asked him to play the song on his stringless violin. He did. And I don’t know why, but I began to sob tearlessly.

“It’s the song of the murdered Hasidim, sung to thank their
ancestor, the Master of the Good Name, the Besht, for having inspired, guided and enriched them.”

“So the fellow was a Hasid?”

“He was Hasid and anti-Hasid, a rationalist and a mystic, infinitely proud and deeply humble: He alone knows when the hour of Redemption will toll. But he won’t tell anyone. Like my violin, he is silent.”

I hesitatingly asked him the name of this mysterious person, fearful I’d be disappointed. I was not.

“He has several identities.”

“But under which identity did he introduce himself to you?”

“G’dalya.”

I knew it. I had guessed it from the beginning.

“He said he also went under the names Menahem, Yaakov and even One-Eyed Paritus. Yet he wasn’t one-eyed. He saw people and things clearly. Why did he pretend to have only one eye? I don’t know. But he understood the thirst of the gods and men’s desire to make sparks fly, and also the language of birds and clouds.”

I said I’d be very grateful if he could help me find this man.

“No problem,” he said. “He comes here every evening to listen to my violin. He’s among the crowd.”

“How will I recognize him?” I didn’t want to reveal that I had already met him once, at sea.

“Don’t worry. He’ll recognize you thanks to my instrument.”

That evening, the musician played a Hasidic tune, which made me realize that, in the face of memory, joys and sorrows merge.

• • •

In his prison, in his turmoil, Shaltiel tells himself that he could use the musician right now, and especially this G’dalya who hides behind the figure of One-Eyed Paritus.